Friday Update #2 (Cleaned Zoey Sprites, Cleaned Britney Sprites, and 1080p) (Patreon)

1. Cleaned Zoey Sprites

TiltSHIFT has finished the full lining update for the front pose Zoey sprites. I've posted the same outfits from the previous Zoey sprites sketch post (as well as the full expressions sheet with comparisons to the placeholder sprites). The next step for Zoey's sprites is coloring everything. Once that's done, it's on to repeating the process with the 3/4 angle pose sprites.

2. Cleaned Britney Sprites

After several back-and-forth revisions, Myumi has finally finished the lineart for Britney's sprites. Her boobs ended up a bit bigger than we expected, but sometimes that's a good thing.

In order, these are:

• A casual outfit that shows plenty of skin.
• Her school uniform.
• Casual winter wear based on this outfit for Haruna from Kantai Collection (the pendant is meant to be a gold Christian cross and will be adjusted later).
• Lacy lingerie.
• A magical girl cosplay (based on a genderswapped Ky Kiske from Guilty Gear).
• Nude (with her hair down).

Her sprites come in 3 poses, each with these 6 outfits, 14 expressions, and 2 hairstyles.

3. 1080p

I've been wanting to do this for a while now, but Espeon and I have finally decided to move the game away from a 1280x720 window to a 1920x1080 one. While this is a fairly complicated move, since I've been planning for this eventual transition since day 1 of the project, a lot of those higher-rez assets are already good to go.

A bump from 720p to 1080p may not sound like much, but that means that we can show twice as many pixels on screen which means everything will be sharper and clearer. If you're playing on an older laptop or a phone screen, the visual improvement will be negligible, but for those on larger screens, the increase in quality is instantly noticeable.

Compare the 720p screenshot used for our TFGS image header:

To a new 1080p screenshot of the same scene:

And you'll see that the difference is huge.

Unfortunately, all of our placeholder HCGs and a few of the placeholder character sprites (such as Britney and the mall clothing store attendants) are slightly fuzzy compared to our high-rez Zoey placeholder, the 1080p backgrounds, and the sharpened text:

This is an inescapable issue because those placeholder HCGs and sprites come from low-resolutions sources; outside of redrawing them from scratch, there's no way to get around upscaling artifacts, even with advanced upscalers like Waifu2x.

But don't worry! Our own assets that we have the rights to use (such as every background, Keisuke and Ai's sprites, and the shower HCGs) look crisp in 1080p. When these blurry placeholder assets are eventually replaced, they'll be suited for 1080p as well.

As of writing this, Espeon and I are nearly done with this transition to the 1920x1080 window resolution. I honestly expected this to take the full two week dev cycle, but since we've been so efficient with our work, we'll have time for new story content that will continue Zach's first day of classes in his new body. Look forward to it next week!